EU gives Telenor responsibility for key 5G project

The European Union has given Telenor Group coordination responsibility for its new European project to accelerate the uptake of 5G across Europe.

Telenor’s Fornebu HQ

The initiative, 5G Verticals INNovation Infrastructure (5G-VINNI), comprises 23 partners including major operators, academia and industry vendors.

The project is designed to ease uptake of 5G mobile platforms in Europe by providing afacility that validates the performance of new 5G technologies, and explore applications such as public safety, eHealth, shipping, transportation, media and entertainment services and automotive.

The project will use the latest 5G technologies, including results from previous 5G PPP phases, employing techniques such as network virtualization, slicing, radio and core technologies.

An automated testing campaign will be employed to validate 5G under various combinations of technologies and network loads.

5G-VINNI will be run at four main sites located in Norway, the UK, Spain and Greece. In addition, experimental sites will be established in Germany and Portugal. Open APIs will be provided in order to ensure easy access to the 5G-VINNI facility.

The 5G facility in Norway will be run by Telenor Research, Telenor Norway and Telenor Satellite and hosted in two locations: one in Kongsberg, the first city where Telenor will pilot 5G in Norway, and another site in the greater Oslo area. Nokia will provide the virtualization platform and end-to-end orchestration, Ericsson and Huawei will supply 5G radios and core, and Cisco will deliver a distributed IoT data fabric service.

The project is scheduled to run for three years and has a budget of €20 million.

“We are proud to be given the opportunity to coordinate the 5G-VINNI project and to explore valuable future solutions for the vertical industries. Being one of three large-scale test platforms for Europe, 5G-VINNI will help propel the development of 5G. Our aim is to make it as easy as possible to utilise and test the platform and we now call on industry players in Europe to engage with the project,” said Patrick Waldemar, VP of Telenor Research, who will manage the project for Telenor Group.